Pardon this rant but......
As of last week, I moved (not by choice) from an iPhone 6, running "8.2.something" to new shiny 6sPlus running 10.3.1. And… what an eye opener that was. 6’1” 210 lb guys shouldn’t cry, but sometimes it’s just that bad. I feel like I now need to run out and buy a shiny red backpack, or maybe a bunch of friendship bracelets. (Do they even have those any more?)
Nobody argues that Apple's IOS lineage has ever had the business user in mind. Long gone are the days of an inbox that displays "single line" email, a calendar without spinning wheels, or address books where you can view 20-30 contacts per page on a normal font size.
IOS changes be it good or bad, are more subtle when experienced over time...for some, like water on stone, for others like me, Chinese water torture as I've seen clean, efficient, logical menus/layout, and other features disappear slowly with each update.
Having jumped from 8.2 all the way to 10.3.1 in an instant vs. over 2+ years, it was a fire hose of realization of just how far Apple’s IOS and user interface has drifted away from the needs of business/professional users. As I was able to instantly able juxtapose the two, all I could think was... what or who is Apple's target audience?
There is a growing (I think massive) void in the market for a smartphone that offers an operating system w a clean, efficient user interface that does a few things really really well - Email, Calendar, Messaging, Phone with a big removable battery that lasts long, and memory expansion. Sacrifice do-everything functionality for efficiency. Sacrifice ADD inspiring omnipresent inter-connectivity for more silo’d tasking function-ability. You know, big boy/girl tasks… high volume, no-nonsense, efficiency required…
For the working world doesn’t need a picture for their contacts, nor an email inbox that looks like the old board game shoots-and-latters, or candy land. A world where the Email, Cal, Messaging and Phone don't compromise ease of use and efficiency for the sake of integrating or inter-connectivity for the sake of it with other apps, or other aspects of life.
Where screen real estate (not screen size but how the operating system uses that space) wins over the space hogging emojis, bubbles, big round fluffy Fisher Price icons, contact avatar pictures, widgets, dancing screens, slide up, drag down.... you get the idea.
I’m not sure at what update between 8.2 and 10.3.1 it went off the rails, but apple maps app is now un-usable. Until now, I was able to avoid the battery and location sucking maps options out there. The messaging app is also less clean and more cluttered with icons buttons and other trinkets. And who decided that when you now turn iPhone into landscape, that we want a default split screen experience with menus and or folders on the left. How about just the same page but now wider? Or the ability to disable the split screen?
I remember back in the day (actually last week), when I could add my boarding passes and hotels for the week into Passport with one click, and then open them up without a permanent Apple "set up ipay" Ad taking up half the screen... (Yes, you now have to "tap" you way around such things) You cannot disable...why? In my entire life, I will never need ipay, and smart enough to know where to go to activate it if I ever were to change my mind..... Again, back to whom are they designing this phone for??
It is sad really. The shift from ios 6 to 7 was the beginning of the end, and the start of developers following vs leading, changing the look, shapes, sizes, colors to seem more android like. Back then the loss was limited to visual...the once clean efficient UI that made Apple iPhone art, a thing of beauty once powered on.
Now, the loss comes also with the bizarre operating system that makes one feel like they are holding a child’s toy. A toy that isn't a made up of efficient independent, task oriented apps and features that just simply work well, but a mish mash of things that all play off each other, like a giant tangle of spaghetti, one big heaving organism of interactive, over stimulated madness. Where no one app menu or setting works really well in its own right because that now takes a back seat to the apparent need for inter connectivity. Of which none of it does any one thing well, but sure is colorful, and busy, and time consuming.
For those of us who task...open calendar, make appointment...close calendar, open email, read email, close email, and need to navigate hundreds of them, or search through thousands of contacts, locate contact, close contacts, open text msg, type, send and close. We don't needs these functions bloated and bogged down to where they loose their identity and functionality because apple thinks the user making an appointment might need to simultaneously have it notify facebook, order a pizza, cancel a Lyft ride, and... I don’t know....send the world a gif of a dancing kitty cat.
IPhone was once, at best, a "play phone" that worked well. Now it is just a play phone.
Someone is going to create a "work phone" that plays well. That is what we need.
